Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Rosalind Rosenberg's Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (©1992 by Rosalind Rosenberg). It begins a chapter subsection titled “The Struggle for Suffrage." The word suffrage refers to the right to vote.

The difficulty women reformers faced in winning legislative change brought home the importance of suffrage. In 1910 the fight for women's suffrage was more than sixty years old, a national campaign by the National American Woman Suffrage Association was twenty years old, and yet women could vote in only Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado.

Hard though it is to understand, given today's widespread apathy toward voting, early twentieth-century Americans harbored a deep-seated fear that women's suffrage would bring radical change to society. Women's suffrage challenged one of the fundamental assumptions of American politics: that the basic unit of political life was the family, with the father standing at its head representing and protecting his wife and children in the wider world. To grant suffrage to women would be to break up that fundamental unit.

Given the country's strong tradition of individual rights, one might think that women's demand for suffrage would have succeeded more quickly in America than in Europe, where suffrage campaigns were also under way. But women's ideological advantage in the United States was offset by a crippling liability—the central importance of the family to maintaining social order. America had no aristocratic tradition of deference nor any dominating church. In America the family alone stood between the individual and chaos. To weaken the traditional hierarchy within the family, to place women on a political footing equal to that of men, risked undermining America's one bulwark against anarchy. Despite a tradition of individual liberty, therefore, many Americans looked on the demand for female suffrage as a radical assault on the social order.

The radical nature of suffrage had been clear from the start. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first women's rights meeting at Seneca Falls in 1848, the many goals that were at first identified as worthy of support did not include the vote. Women wanted property rights, the right to divorce abusive husbands, the right to an education equal to any man's, and the right to join any profession. But the idea of the vote seemed too extreme. Men gradually agreed to extend property rights to women, because property in a wife's name could save a man from his creditors. They accepted coeducation, because universities needed students and society needed trained teachers. But the vote was something else. To give women the vote would mean recognizing them as individuals with their own rights and interests.

So radical did the suffrage demand appear that for decades few women thought it worth pursuing. Suffragists therefore labored under the considerable disadvantage of being generals with no army. The problem was made painfully clear in 1895 when Massachusetts (a hotbed of suffrage activity) conducted a referendum in which women were permitted to vote on the question of whether suffrage should be extended to females. The referendum was defeated, as had been expected, but the alarming fact was that far more men than women voted in favor of women's suffrage. In 1902 Susan B. Anthony ruefully observed, “In the indifference, the inertia, the apathy of women, lies the greatest obstacle to the enfranchisement.”

Changes taking place outside the movement, however, gradually enabled suffragists to expand and legitimize their role. Women's increased employment, their educational attainments, their club work, and especially their reform activities transformed the suffrage movement from isolated, insistent women into part of a larger phenomenon—a movement of women to reform a world that most Americans, including most men, regarded as badly in need of change. By 1910 there existed an extensive interlocking directorate of women leaders in the reform and suffrage movements. Jane Addams and Florence Kelley were the two most important, holding between them offices in the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Women's TradeUnion League, the National Consumers' League, the Women's Peace Party, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). This network of women gave suffrage leaders an audience they had lacked. The General Federation of Women's Clubs did not endorse suffrage until 1914, but throughout the preceding decade its local clubs listened to representatives of NAWSA explain the connection between the reform legislation the clubs supported and the need for more votes on behalf of those laws. Gradually, support for women's suffrage grew.